Finally, after nearly a month of silence, Apple has seeded the 3rd beta of iOS 5.1 to developers. As you may recall, the company pushed out beta 2 all the way back on December 12th of last year.

As several other sites are noting, the update only seems to be available via OTA (over-the-air) for previous iOS 5.1 users, but it should be available from Apple’s regular developer portal shortly…

Judging by the screen grabs we’ve seen, beta 3 doesn’t seem to be too exciting. Its brief changelog states that the update just “contains bug fixes and improvements.” But we’re not writing it off just yet.

Folks digging through iOS 5.1’s source code have already uncovered a number of interesting things, including evidence that Apple may be close to releasing devices with quad-core processors. So stay tuned.

Be sure to let us know if you discover anything cool in beta 3, and we’ll do the same.